Talk:Homosexuality in ancient Rome

Adult homosexuality in the Satyricon

User:Antinoos69 removed a pssage of my authorship where it was said that the Satyricon treats homosexual affairs between free adult men with some sympathy. The passage had as a reference this article, authored by Rabun Taylor, where the following is said:

Of all the surviving literature from the Roman period, only Petronius's Satyricon offers a sympathetic view of homosexual relationships between coevals.

The author himself uses as a reference for this passage two academic works, "Homosexuality in the Satyricon" by T. Wade Richardson, published in 1984 on Classica et Mediaevalia, and Craig Williams's 1992 dissertation "Homosexuality and the Roman Man".

Further in his article, Taylor writes the following, based on Williams's text:

The view from the inside is best presented in the Satyricon. Craig Williams's reading of the novel reveals an environment where freeborn men have genuine relationships in which they trade active and passive roles without shame...

User:Antinoos69 warns me not to cite works by scholars who express "minority opinions". But as far as I know, a census of classical scholars on adult homosexuality in the Satyricon' has never been conducted so that Wiki editors know which is the majority or the minority view. Has any published work actually denied that adult homosexuality is portrayed in that book? Can User:Antinoos69 actually cite us one?

In any case, I made use of a reliable source, and as far as I care, that's what should matter to fellow editors.Rafe87 (talk) 03:15, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

In addition, reliably sourced passages shouldn't be removed based only on certain editors' inability to remember the entire work under discussion.Rafe87 (talk) 03:17, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

You know perfectly well that Taylor represents a minority view on Roman male-male sex, generally, as in the article you cite, “subculture” and all. And here’s the problem with using scholars representing such minority views and the reason I insisted you present specific page references, which you failed to do. Williams speaks in terms of “[t]he difference in their ages,” which would typically recall the traditional roles of amator (lover) and puer (boy), whereas Taylor mischaracterizes all this as concerning “freeborn men” (Taylor 327–28)—and, earlier, “coevals” (320)—which then morphs into your “freeborn adult men.” That’s simply an amateurish and very misleading and counterproductive mess. So my memory actually served me very well. You’ll have to get rid of the highly unreliable and minority-view Taylor and instead speak in terms of a majority-view scholar like Williams, or just drop the subject entirely—unless, of course, you wish to detail how several different scholars represent this matter, which would seem to give the subject undue weight. Williams may very well have had something to say on the matter in his standard reference, Roman Homosexuality, either edition. I suggest you start there, if you wish to pursue the subject. Antinoos69 (talk) 06:28, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

Gaius Luscius/Lusius?

In the linked article on Trebonius, the man he killed for attempting to rape him is repeatedly referred to "Gaius Lusius" without a "c", but here repeatedly as "Gaius Luscius". I've no idea which is correct, but the spelling with a "c" is somewhat comical, since the name could be "translated" as "gay and luscious". Did someone slip this in as a joke, I wonder?89.212.50.177 (talk) 11:06, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

https://archive.org/details/quaesupersuntomn02plut/page/n835 and http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Marius*.html#14 have (Caius) "Lusius". wikt:Luscius means something else, cf. Luscia (gens). Nemo 12:29, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Dio Cassius, Seneca, and exoleti

Rafe87, I’m afraid you’ve erred regarding Dio Cassius, Seneca, and exoleti. First, Williams’ discussion of exoleti doesn’t begin until p. 90. The term itself isn’t introduced until p. 91, being applied to males occupying a broad range of ages, including those who have just “passed the hairless bloom of youth.” Second, on page 89, regarding Dio Cassius and Seneca, Williams actually doesn’t use the term but translates the Greek as “mature males,” which leaves a lot of wiggle room. Third, the Greek is μειρακίοις ἐξώροις. We can take ἐξώροις as “grown” or “beyond (their) prime,” and μειρακίοις as “lads” or “young men,” but definitely not as males substantially older than that. You can check all that in the LSJ. So we are dealing here with males at the lower end of the age spectrum for exoleti, per Williams’ discussion of the term. That is where I got my more current and idiomatic “grown boys or men.” I trust that is now sufficiently clear. Antinoos69 (talk) 11:24, 28 June 2019 (UTC) Also note that the translation linked to in the article has “boys past their prime,” the translation I would actually favor, which you may now better understand. I was trying to stick as close to the original wording of the article as I could reasonably justify. Antinoos69 (talk) 11:53, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Antinoos69, you're correct and I was wrong about Williams. But in discussing Seneca's sexual tastes, Paul Veyne uses the term exoleti in the above-quoted article (p. 62): To be more exact, he says of Seneca that he "préférait aux femmes les exoleti." Since Cassius Dio seems to be the only ancient source we have in hand that touches upon this subject, that is, Seneca's sexuality, it is undoubtedly to Dio Cassius' book that Veyne is referring. Although the term exoletus and that used by Dio are not the same (Dio, after all, didn't write in Latin but in Greek), there is semantic equivalence. In Williams' book this much is at least implied, for he himself notes of exoletus and the Greek term used by Dio to describe Seneca's lover that both indicate something or someone that is overgrown, past its prime.

First off, the very idea of ​​"boys past their prime" is paradoxical if one considers the norms of Roman eroticism — that it was the signs of fully matured manhood that denoted the end of the boy's desirability; boyhood, whether pubertal or prepubertal, was in itself extremely desirable. Even the oldest adolescent boys were still desirable as long as they had not crossed the threshold of adulthood. Amy Riclin, in The Guarden of Priapus, says in fact that in Roman erotic poetry "the larger the penis and the closer the boy to adulthood, the more attractive he becomes" (p.56). We can't speak of literal "boys past their prime", unless these boys are adult and therefore not boys in the sense we have today.

Secondly, as this very entry notes, "puer" is not a mere chronological term. It also has an erotic dimension, and in this sense it can also apply to adult men who are the object of desire of another man (or perhaps even a woman). Horace, for example, in Ode 4.1, calls a friend of his "puer", although it is clear that the latter was no longer a real boy (he was already a lawyer after all). The same is true for Greek terms denoting the junior partner in homosexual affairs, such as pais, paidika, or eromenos.

When Dio says that Seneca liked "boys past their prime," we're therefore not forced to understand "boys" in the passage in the way we understand it today, that is, as a chronological term. And when it comes specifically to "boy's past their prime," we, knowing what we know of the sexual tastes of Greeks and Romans, must conclude these are not real boys, or at least not in the sense we have today.

We are not here describing only the values and habits of a past civilization. We are also trying to make them intelligible to a modern readership — one that is not necessarily very well informed on the subject at hand (encyclopedias, after all, have the beginning audience as the main audience). And the idea of "boys past their prime" is confusing for this type of reader, especially in the context of this entry, which makes it clear in the first paragraph that it is adulthood that puts an end to the boy's status as an object of desire on for Roman men. Terms that are too idiosyncratic - "overgrown boys" or "boys past their prime", for example - we must translate in terms intelligible for the modern reader: in our example, that means "adult male junior lovers in homoerotic affairs", or for brevity "adult men".Rafe87 (talk) 15:00, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Rafe87, I’m afraid you’re a bit confused. First, Williams does not treat ἔξωρος as a technical translation of exoletus. He writes, “Perhaps the closest linguistic equivalent for Latin exoletus is the Greek adjective exôros . . . . Although never used as a calque for the technical term exoletus . . .” (92). Note that second sentence. The rough parallel is merely to the age of the male sexual objects so designated.

Second, remember that, for Williams, who literally wrote the book on Roman homosexuality, exoleti constitute a class of male prostitutes. He writes, introducing the term, “Indeed, male prostitutes who had passed the hairless bloom of youth were a visible feature of the Roman cultural landscape, to such an extent, in fact, that there existed a technical term for them” (91). That technical term, he goes on to explain, was exoletus. There isn’t the slightest indication in Dio Cassius that the “lads” in question are prostitutes, which casts substantial question on the relevance of Seneca to this section of the article.

Third, surely you are not attempting to use a passing comment in a footnote, made without documentation or reference of any kind, of an article written by Veyne in 1978 to cast doubt on the most authoritative and still current source ever written on Roman homosexuality. I’ll be merciful and let that one pass without further comment.

Fourth, you keep ignoring the presence (and translation) of μειρακίοις in Dio Cassius. μειράκιον means “lad,” “stripling,” or “boy.” It does not denote a male substantially above the age of twenty or twenty-one, though it can denote males substantially below those ages. Again, check the LSJ (“boy” is from the eighth edition). This is where translators and translations get the “boys” or “lads” of “grown boys” or “boys past their prime.” I would suggest you not try to correct them. They know far more than you.

Fifth, while you may be confused by “boys past their prime,” the notion is commonplace among scholars of ancient Greek and Roman male-male sex, as among ancient Greeks and Romans. Some men, it is and was known, preferred boys with an adolescent down on their cheeks, just passing the bloom of youth but by no means men, let alone patres familias or senes. You are improperly constructing concrete walls between these age designations; they are much more porous and overlapping.

Sixth, remember, exoletus covers a broad range of ages, sometimes including, at the lower end, the literal adolescens, as Williams makes explicitly clear (91–92). Seventh, I would caution you to steer clear of speculations and original research. Let’s stick to the best sources and lexica.

In fact, looking up at my second point above, I think we should remove all mention of Seneca from this section of the article. There is no evidence presented that his affections were aimed specifically at maturish prostitutes and, therefore, exoleti. Antinoos69 (talk) 05:55, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

I will not completely restore all the content you removed, but I put back the mention made to Seneca. Even though the term "exoletus" has not been used in original sources to refer to one of its lovers, the Greek exorus is at least partially synonymous with it.

By the way, I have never said that exoletus and that term used by Dio Cassius to refer to Seneca's lovers were translation one from the other - what I did say is that they are semantically equivalent. This is made explicit in Veyne's use of exoletus to refer to Seneca's boyfriends. (And by the way, I don't think it as significant as you do the fact that the passage in which Veyne makes this reference is a footnote.) In any case, the passage you copied from Williams above does not refute Veyne - it in fact corroborates the semantic overlap of exoletus and exos, so I think Seneca belongs in that section.

The fact that, according to Dio, Seneca taught Nero the love of more mature men, and that Seneca practiced passive acts with these exôroi, indicates that Dio was making an allusion to the affair between Nero and Pythagoras, his former slave with whom, according to to Suetonius, Nero adopted the passive role. There likely was, therefore, a heavy overlap between Seneca's exôroi and Nero's exoleti in Dio's mind.

I put back that exoleti are usually "slaves or prostitutes." Williams himself, in the section discussing exoleti, mentions not only prostitutes but also slaves. And other modern scholars explicitly describe adult male slaves as exoleti of their masters. The excerpt below is from a chapter penned by Veyne in "The history of private life", Vol. I:

The pet lamented the loss of his position, but the master caused his long, girlish locks to be cut—to the great relief of the mistress of the house. Some stubborn masters kept their pets even after they had stopped growing (exoletus), but such behavior was considered reprehensible.

This is, by the way, in the main text of page 79, not on a footnote. [Butrica also describes exoleti as adult pueri delicati], or adult boy-slaves, elsewhere.Rafe87 (talk) 19:51, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

I have restored the picture of Seneca back to the article. But instead of describing exoleti as "men" in the legend, I use the (I hope, less contentious) "males".Rafe87 (talk) 19:57, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

I disagree with just about every word you just said and suggest you reread my previous post; otherwise, we are at an absolute impasse. In that case, note that there is no consensus for the disputed content, in which case it must go.

There can be no question, per my previous post, that Williams considers and explicitly declares exoleti a class of male prostitutes. So both prostitution and age must be demonstrated to show an exoletus is being discussed. Therefore, exoletus and ἔξωρος are not “semantically equivalent” in this context. The only rough point of contact is age. I am uninterested in your original research. Stick to sources that actually allow us to know what precisely they are talking about. Antinoos69 (talk) 01:43, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Note that none other than the OLD² translates the noun exoletus with nothing more than the phrase, “A male prostitute.” Antinoos69 (talk) 04:20, 11 July 2019 (UTC)